Loe raamatut: «Princes of the Outback»

One

Six months later

Angelina Mori didn’t mean to eavesdrop. If, at the last minute, she hadn’t remembered the solemnity of the occasion she would have charged into the room in her usual forthright fashion and she wouldn’t have heard a thing.

But she did remember the occasion—this morning’s burial, this afternoon’s reading of the will, the ensuing meeting between Charles Carlisle’s heirs—and she paused and steadied herself to make a decorous entrance into the Kameruka Downs library.

Which is how she came to overhear the three deep, male voices. Three voices as familiar to Angie’s ear as those of her own two brothers.

“You heard what Konrads said. We don’t all have to do this.” Alex, the eldest, sounded as calm and composed as ever. “It’s my responsibility.”

“News flash.” Rafe’s mocking drawl hadn’t changed a bit in the time she’d been gone. “Your advanced age doesn’t make you the expert or the one in charge of this. How about we toss a coin. Heads, you—”

“The hell you say. We’re in this together. One in, all in.” Tomas’s face, she knew, would be as hard and expressionless as his voice. Heartbreakingly different to the man she remembered from…Was it only five years ago? It seemed so much longer, almost another lifetime.

“A nice sentiment, little bro’, but aren’t you forgetting something?” Rafe asked. “It takes two to make a baby.”

Angie didn’t drop the tray of sandwiches she held, but it was a near thing. Heart hammering, she pulled the tray tight against her waist and steadied it with a white-knuckled grip. The rattling plates quieted; the pounding of her heart didn’t.

And despite what she’d overheard—or maybe because of it—she didn’t slink away.

With both hands occupied, she couldn’t knock on the half-closed door. Instead she nudged it open with one knee and cleared her throat. Loudly. Twice. Because now the voices were raised in strident debate on who was going to do this—get married? have a baby? in order to inherit?— and how.

Holy Henry Moses.

Angie cleared her throat a third time, and three pairs of intensely irritated, blue eyes turned her way. The Carlisle brothers. “Princes of the Outback” according to this week’s headlines, but only because some hack had once dubbed their father’s extensive holdings in the Australian outback “Carlisle’s Kingdom.”

Angie had grown up by their rough-and-tumble side. They might look like the tabloid press’s idea of Australian royalty, but they didn’t fool her for a second.

Princes? Ha!

“What?” at least two princes barked now.

“Sorry to intrude, but you’ve been holed up in here for yonks. I thought you might need some sustenance.” She deposited her tray in the center of the big oak desk and her hip on its edge. Then she reached for the bottle of forty-year-old Glenfiddich—pilfered from their father’s secret stash—and swirled the rich, amber contents in the light. More than half-full. Amazing. “I thought you’d have made a bigger dent in this.”

Alex squinted at the glass in his hand as if he’d forgotten its existence. Rafe winked and held his out for a refill. Broad back to the room, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his black dress trousers, Tomas acknowledged neither the whisky nor her arrival.

And no one so much as glanced at the sandwiches. They didn’t want sustenance. They wanted her to leave so they could continue their discussion.

Tough.

She slid her backside further onto the desk, took her time selecting a corn beef and pickle triangle, then arched a brow at the room in general. “So, what’s this about a baby?”

Tomas’s shoulders tensed. Alex and Rafe exchanged a look.

“It’s no use pretending nothing’s going on,” she said around her first bite. “I overheard you talking.”

For a long moment she thought they’d pull the old boys’ club number, buttoning up in front of the girl. Except this girl had spent her whole childhood tearing around Kameruka Downs in the dust of these three males and her two brothers. Sadly outnumbered, she’d learned to chase hard and to never give up. She glanced sideways at Tomas’s back. At least not until she was completely beaten.

“Well?” she prompted.

Rafe, bless his heart, relented. “What do you think, Ange? Would you—”

“This is supposed to be private,” Alex said pointedly.

“You don’t think Ange’s opinion is valuable? She’s a woman.”

“Thank you for noticing,” Angie murmured. From the corner of her eye she watched Tomas who had never noticed, while she fought two equally strong, conflicting urges. One part of her ached to slide off the desk and wrap him and his tightly held pain in a big old-fashioned hug. The other wanted to slug him one for ignoring her.

“Would you have somebody’s baby…for money?”

What? Her attention swung from the still and silent figure by the window and back to Rafe. She swallowed. “Somebody’s?”

“Yeah.” Rafe cocked a brow. “Take our little brother, the hermit, for example. He says he’d pay and since that’s—”

“Enough,” Alex cut in.

Unnecessarily, as it happened, because a second later—so quick, Angie didn’t see it coming—Tomas held Rafe by the shirtfront. The two harsh flat syllables he uttered would never have emanated from any prince’s mouth.

Alex separated them, but Tomas only stayed long enough for a final curt directive to his brothers. “You do this your way, I’ll do it mine. I don’t need your approval.”

He didn’t slam the door on his way out, and it occurred to Angie that that would have shown too much passion, too much heat, for the cold, remote stranger the youngest Carlisle had become.

“I guess my opinion is beside the point now,” she said carefully.

Rafe coughed out a laugh. “Only if you think Mr. Congeniality can find himself a woman.”

Angie’s heart thumped against her ribs. Oh, he could. She had no doubts about that. Tomas Carlisle might have forgotten how to smile, but he could take his big, hard body and I’ve-been-hurt-bad attitude into any bar and choose from the top shelf. Without any mention of the Carlisle billions.

A chill shivered through her skin as she put down the remains of her sandwich. “He won’t do anything stupid, will he?”

“Not if we stop him.”

Alex shook his head. “Leave him be, Rafe.”

“Do you really think he’s in any mood to make a discriminating choice?” Rafe made an impatient sound, not quite a laugh, not quite a snort. “What the hell was Dad thinking anyway? He should have left Tomas right out of this!”

“Maybe he wanted to give him a shake-up,” Alex said slowly.

“The kind that sends him out looking to cut a deal with the first bar-bunny he happens upon?”

Angie stood so swiftly, her head spun. Whoa. Breathing deeply, she leaned against the desk. It was okay. Kameruka Downs was two hours of black dust and corrugated roads from the nearest bar. Even if Tomas did decide to hightail it into Koomah Crossing, he wouldn’t make closing time.

She exhaled slowly and settled back on the desk. “Confession time, guys. I really only overheard one slice of your earlier discussion, so who’d like to fill me in on the whole story?”

Once, on a bet, Angie had raced Tomas and her brother Carlo from the homestead to the waterhole, blindfolded. Remembering that experience fifteen years ago made tonight’s steep descent a veritable walk in the park. A threequarter moon rode high in the sky, casting enough light for Angie to pick a surefooted path through the scrub. Behind a bandanna blindfold there’d been nothing but intense black, yet she’d closed her eyes and run.

Anything to prove herself less of a girl.

You’re part feral goat, the boys had spat in disgust as they handed over her winnings, and it had taken Angie years to realize that comparison wasn’t exactly flattering.

Her smile, wry and reminiscent, faded as she neared her destination. Moment of truth, sister. She rubbed warming hands up and down her goose-bumped arms. She would bet the vintage silk-georgette dress she’d vainly not changed out of—despite the chill night and a setting more suited to jeans—that Tomas had retreated to his usual lair.

And when you find him, you say your piece and you make sure he listens. You don’t let him turn his back.

She’d seen Tomas several times since her return from Italy a week earlier. At the hospital before his father passed away, at the memorial service held largely for his city business associates, at Alex’s Sydney home afterward. Yet he’d managed to evade anything beyond a quick consoling hug and a few token words of sympathy.

So she’d stayed on at Kameruka Downs after the private funeral, begging a lift back to Sydney on the corporate jet with Alex and Rafe, instead of returning on the afternoon charter arranged for other mourners. She had to talk to Tomas, one on one. She had to set things straight between them.

This had nothing to do with the disturbing clause in Charles’s will that she’d just learned about in the library. This was about guilt and regret and failing to be the kind of friend she wanted to be. It was about closure, too, and moving on with her life.

And it promised to be damn-near the toughest thing she’d ever done. Tougher even than the night she’d confronted Tomas with her opinion on his upcoming marriage…and that had been Tough with a capital T!

It wasn’t that she hadn’t liked Brooke. They’d been close friends at school. Tomas had met his future wife at Angie’s eighteenth birthday party, on a night when she’d dressed and preened and set herself on being noticed as a woman instead of his wild-child pseudosister.

Instead—the supreme irony—he’d fallen into complete blinker-eyed besottedness with her petite and delicate friend. And eighteen months later he hadn’t wanted to hear Angie’s opinion on Brooke’s suitability to life in the outback. He loved Brooke. He married Brooke.

And that had been one tough challenge Angie couldn’t face.

Instead of accepting the bridesmaid’s gig, she’d taken off on a backpacking jaunt to Europe. Her grand adventure had started as an impulsive escape from pain and envy, from her fear that she wouldn’t make it through “does anyone have just cause” without jumping to her feet and yelling, “You bet I do! He’s supposed to be mine!”

She’d missed the wedding and, worse, she’d missed Brooke’s funeral. But now she was back, needing to make peace with her conscience. She doubted she could make peace with the flint-hard stranger Tomas had become, but she had to try.

“Moment of truth,” she muttered, out loud this time, as she ducked under a branch into the clearing beside the waterhole.

Slowly she scanned the darkness and the empty shadows, before hauling herself up onto a rock overhang. On sure feet she climbed higher to the secret cave. Peered inside.

Backed-up breath huffed from her lungs.

Nothing. Damn.

Disappointment expanded, tightening her chest as she slowly descended to the ground. She’d made a deal with herself, a deal about finding him and getting this over with tonight. How could she do that when he wasn’t here?

Swearing softly, she turned to leave.

Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to be found…

Her eyes narrowed. Perhaps Tomas hadn’t changed completely. Perhaps now, as in the past, he wasn’t completely alone down here.

Angie allowed herself a small smile before she lifted both pinkies to her pursed lips and whistled.

Tomas figured someone—most likely Angie—would come looking for him. He’d counted on the night hiding his secluded location. He hadn’t counted on her whistling his dog.

Ajay responded with a high-pitched whine of suspicion. Rough translation: You can whistle—point in your favor—but I’m no pushover. I’m a red heeler; I protect my boss. You better proceed with caution.

Angie didn’t.

The quick tread of her approach was as incisive and uninhibited as her personality. Loose gravel dislodged by her climbing feet splished into the water below, and Tomas saw the hair rise along Ajay’s spine. Under his restraining hand he felt a warning growl vibrate through the dog’s tense body. It was a measure of his own snarled mood that he actually considered letting the heeler loose.

He didn’t.

His muttered “Stay” was probably for the dog—God knows Angie wouldn’t take a lick of notice!

As if to prove his point, she appeared out of the darkness and used his shoulder to steady herself as she dropped down at his side. The floaty skirt of her dress settled around her legs where they dangled over the rock ledge, a flutter of feminine contrast to the rugged setting and the worn denim stretched over his thighs alongside.

“Did you consider I might want to be alone?” he asked, surprising himself with the even tone of his voice. Ever since Jack Konrads read out that newly added will clause, tension had snarled through his blood and his flesh. An anger that had whipped the hollow numbness of grief and loss into something hot and taut and hazardous.

“Yes,” she said simply, with a quick flash of smile.

Although that could have been for Ajay, because on the heels of the smile came a softly crooned note of surprise. Her hand slid from his shoulder down his arm—from rolled-up shirtsleeve to skin—as she leaned around him to take a better look. “While I was clambering up here, I kinda thought you mightn’t have Sergeant anymore.”

“He died.”

For the tiniest hint of time, she stilled. Then the pressure of her hand on his forearm changed, a tactile expression of her next words. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He got old.”

“As we all do.” She leaned forward. “Well, aren’t you handsome.” And started to reach—“Best you don’t do that.”

“I’m only saying hello.”

And wouldn’t you know it? His wary-natured heeler didn’t take a piece out of her hand. Tomas breathed a tad easier…but only a tad. He was still struggling to reconcile the Angie he knew—the annoying, exasperating, teenage tomboy—with this exotic, alien creature who’d returned from Europe.

She wore dresses, for pity’s sake. She’d straightened her unruly curls into one of those city-girl do’s, all sleek and dark and glossy. And every time she moved he heard the delicate tinkle of the jewelry she wore on her wrists and ankle.

Hell, she even had some kind of rings on her toes. And as for the perfume…

“What’s with the perfume?”

“Excuse me?”

Yeah, excuse him. He hadn’t meant to say it, the question that blared in his brain every time he breathed around her. Ever since that first day he saw her again—hell, was that only last week?—when she’d rushed down the hallway of the hospital to throw her arms around him, to hug him and hold him and leak tears and words and more tears into his shirt.

Except instead of feeling comforted, he’d dragged in air rich with this perfume and he’d felt her curves against his body and he’d tensed. His hands had set her aside, this woman who no longer felt anything like Angie should.

She’d changed when all he wanted was someone—something—to stay the same. To anchor him to the past that fate kept wrenching away.

“You smell…different,” he accused now. She smelled different, she looked different, and right now in the dark he swore she was looking at him different, too. “You’ve changed, Dash.”

His use of her childhood nickname surprised a laugh from her full lips. With a clink of bracelets, her hand slid away from his arm, thank God, and into her lap. “Wow. There’s a blast from the past. No one’s called me Dash in…forever.”

Yeah, forever about summed it up.

Forever since the last time she’d followed him down here, bent on telling him how the outback and Brooke would never see eye to eye. Like he hadn’t known. And like he’d not been young enough and cocky enough to think it wouldn’t make a difference.

“It’s only been five years, but you’re right. I’ve changed, you’ve changed, everything’s changed,” she said softly, and suddenly the darkness seemed more intense. Suffocatingly so. “I’m sorry about your father, that he got so sick and had to suffer and that the last weeks were so hard on you all. I’m sorry I wasn’t here, and I hope—”

“You didn’t have to come down here to tell me that. I’ve heard it more than enough times this last week.”

“Yeah, well, you haven’t heard it from me. At least not without cutting me off midsentence and walking away.” She angled her chin in that determined way she had. “I have more to say, actually, and this time I want you to stay put until I finish.”

Something about her tone and the sympathetic darkness of her eyes alerted him to what might be on her mind, and he started to move, to get the hell out of the conversation. But she put her hand on his knee, stopping him. It was the Angie-of-old, exasperating and annoying and not letting him get away without first saying her piece.

“Did you get my letter?” she asked.

Yeah, he’d gotten the letter she’d written after Brooke was killed. What did she expect him to say? Thank you for your kind thoughts? They really helped me cope when my heart had been ripped bleeding from my chest.

“I hated that a lousy letter was all I could send,” she continued. “I wish I could have been here. I wish I could have found better words.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

“It would have to me.” She moved her hand—had she always been such a toucher, or had that changed, too?—this time covering his fist where it sat clenched on this thigh. She squeezed his tense knuckles. “I wasn’t here for you when it mattered, when I should have been. What kind of friend does that make me?”

Was he supposed to answer that? Or just sit here like some priest in an outdoors confessional and let her talk so she’d feel better about herself?

He hoped she wasn’t after absolution, because that sure wasn’t anything he was qualified to give!

“Your friendship matters to me. Are we still friends, T.J.?”

His childhood nickname, but it sounded all wrong on her lips because she’d leaned closer, her arm pressed warm and soft against his, her perfume a sensuous drift of woman in his nostrils. And then she did that squeezing thing again, probably meaning to reassure him but only screwing his tension up another notch.

He wrested his hand away, put hers back in her lap. “If it makes you feel better, why the hell not?”

“Yeesh, Tomas!” She let her breath go sharply, exasperated. “Can’t you at least pretend to accept sympathy from a friend? Would that hurt so very much?”

When he didn’t answer, she shook her head slowly. The slippery ends of her hair skimmed against his bare forearm as if coolly mocking one of the reasons he didn’t feel like she was his friend. This strange awareness that he didn’t want or like or need.

The disturbing notion that little Angie had grown up into a woman…and his man’s body wouldn’t stop noticing.

“That’s all I came down here to say,” she said abruptly. “Accept it or don’t. I’ll leave you to enjoy your pity party alone.”

She’d already started to rise, not using his shoulder for leverage this time, and Tomas should have let her go. Shouldn’t have felt the irrational need to ask, “That’s it? That’s all you came down here to say?”

“Oh, boy.” Beside him she stilled, then her laughter rumbled, as soft and husky-dark as the night. “I really want to say, yes, that’s it. I really, really know I should.”

“But?”

“But you wouldn’t have baited me to stay unless you needed to talk.” She sank back down and he felt her gaze on his face, felt it turn serious. “It’s that will clause, isn’t it?”

“You don’t think that’s worth throwing a pity party over?”

She didn’t answer that question, not directly. Instead she sighed and shook her head. “It’s worth worrying about, sure. But wouldn’t you be better off back at the homestead talking it through with your brothers?”

Tomas snorted. “What’s there to talk through?”

“For a start, there’s some worry about how you’ll choose a mother for this baby you think you have to produce.”

“There’s no ‘think’ about it.”

“My understanding is that only one of you needs do this. One baby between the three of you.”

“You think I’d leave it up to my brothers? When I stand to lose all this?” He gestured around him, indicating the land that was more than a family legacy. Kameruka Downs was the only place he’d ever wanted to live and all he had left since the plane crash that took his wife’s life, his happiness, his future.

“Your brothers know this place is everything to you,” Angie said softly.

Wrong. It wasn’t everything; it was the only thing.

“Alex says he’s going to marry Susannah.”

“Yeah, right. When they both can schedule a free hour between meetings. And as for Rafe…” He made a scoffing noise that said it all.

“Yeah,” Angie agreed, and in the ensuing silence—as they both contemplated the unlikely image of Rafe, the consummate playboy, choosing one woman for the job—it almost felt like the old Angie sitting at his side, driving him bonkers one minute, completely in accord the next. “Why do you think he made this stipulation? Your father, I mean.”

“For Mau.”

She contemplated that for a moment. “He knows you guys would do anything for Maura—that’s a given—but he had to know she wouldn’t want some token grandchild. That she wouldn’t be happy unless you all were happy, not forced into it by a clause in his will.”